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It all started with the jam. This being Los Angeles, it wasn’t, of course, just any jam. It was — and is — organic, and local, and often made from varieties of fruit that usually don’t make it out of California, like Blenheim apricots, or combinations that you don’t see elsewhere, like strawberry and rose. The jam is fragrant and not overly sweet, and you want to eat it with a spoon.

Word started to get around that Jessica Koslow, 33, was spreading it with ricotta on burned brioche, and soon there were lines out the door at Sqirl, her cute, shabby, hip little storefront on Virgil Avenue in East Hollywood. “Sqirl was, really, a jam company,” she said to me a couple of weeks ago, munching on a piece of brioche with blood-orange marmalade and almond-hazelnut butter. “I knew it couldn’t stay that way, because I wanted to create a place that worked, long-term, on a street corner that no one wanted to be on.”

Almost every number used to analyze California’s drought can be debated, but this can be safely said: No level of restrictions on residential use can solve the problem. The solution lies with agriculture, which consumes more than its fair share.

That doesn’t mean homeowners can’t and shouldn’t cut back.

But according to estimates by the Public Policy Institute of California, more water was used to grow almonds in 2013 than was used by all homes and businesses in San Francisco and Los Angeles put together. Even worse, most of those almonds are then exported — which means, effectively, that we are exporting water. Unless you’re the person or company making money off this deal, that’s just nuts.

Whether you’re cooking it, eating it, or following the policies around it, food brings people together. In that spirit, I’m introducing #BittmanTopics: a place where we can all share ideas about a different food-related topic each month.

Here’s how it works: at the beginning of the month, I’ll introduce a new subject. For the next few weeks, you can use #BittmanTopics to approach it from whatever angle you like—share related news and articles, exchange recipes and photos, ask questions and swap tips, or just weigh in. At the end of the month, I’ll compile my favorite photos, recipes, and comments (with credit to you, of course) in a post back here on my site and share onsocialmedia. Now on to the topic for April…

Photo by Yunhee Kim

Spring produce. We all thrill to the first hints of spring at the market, like real peas, favas and strawberries. Eating locally, obviously, isn’t new: barely anything was shipped more than a couple of hundred miles until after World War 2. But even though most produce is available year-round, the word “seasonal” still has plenty of meaning. Even now, some of us are enjoying local strawberries while others are just getting those first few ramps.

What does spring produce mean to you? What’s local to you this month? What springtime ingredients and dishes are you cooking right now?

Remember to get in touch on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or in the comments below and share your favorite recipes, articles, thoughts and tips with #BittmanTopics. Check back in as often as you’d like and look for my favorites at the end of the month.

You could almost feel sorry for McDonald’s. That’s an odd sentiment when you consider that the company’s revenues in 2014 were $27.4 billion and its stock price makes it worth something like $92 billion. It’s among the world’s most valuable brands and has three times the United States market share of Subway, its nearest competitor.

Enviable. Yet for years its new products, business ventures, even social media attempts have gone wrong: It sold a 90 percent share in Chipotle,now one of its strongest competitors; it introduced products like chicken wings, which went nowhere; it created a Twitter hashtag, #McDStories, that turned into a bashing event. And it has spectacularly failed to attract or even hold on to millennial customers, who’ve fled in droves.

Meanwhile, it’s the most visible target of an alliance of workers fighting for $15 an hour (most McDonald’s workers make slightly more than the federal minimum wage, $7.25, but it varies by state), and its food is seen as anything but sustainable, fresh or healthy. A result has been a decline that includes a whopping 15 percent drop in its United States operating income in the last quarter of 2014.

Cardoons are clearly related to artichokes, but in no way do they rank as highly, and that’s just the way it is.

I was strolling in a garden the other day and, seeing what I thought were cardoons (because I’m only slightly obsessed with them), asked the gardener, “Oh, are those cardoons?” Her reply: “Oh, God no. Those are artichokes. I’d never grow cardoons.”

Found in farmers’ markets and grocery stores with a wide array of produce, cardoons may not be anyone’s favorite vegetable. But when you consider all the effort that goes into cooking ramps (which, really, no one would bother with if they did not come so early), I think a minor investment in cardoon cooking is worth the trouble. Because with the right technique, they’re pretty great.

The issues surrounding G.M.O.s — genetically modified organisms — have never been simple. They became more complicated last week when the International Agency for Research on Cancer declared that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used herbicide Roundup, probably causes cancer in humans. Two insecticides, malathion and diazinon, were also classified as “probable” carcinogens by the agency, a respected arm of the World Health Organization.

Roundup, made by Monsanto for both home and commercial use, is crucial in the production of genetically engineered corn and soybean crops, so it was notable that the verdict on its dangers came nearly simultaneously with an announcement by the Food and Drug Administration that new breeds of genetically engineered potato and apple are safe to eat. Which they probably are, as are the genetically engineered papayas we’ve been eating for some time. In fact, to date there’s little credible evidence that any food grown with genetic engineering techniques is dangerous to human health — unless, like much corn and soybeans, it’s turned into junk food. But, really, let’s be fair.

Fair, too, is a guess that few people are surprised that an herbicide in widespread use is probably toxic at high doses or with prolonged exposure, circumstances that may be common among farmers and farmworkers. Nor is it surprising that it took so long — Roundup has been used since the 1970s — to discover its likely carcinogenic properties. There is a sad history of us acting as guinea pigs for the novel chemicals that industry develops. For this we have all too often paid with our damaged health.

Some quake in terror as we approach the Terminator scenario, in which clever machines take over the world. After all, it isn’t sci-fi when Stephen Hawking says things like, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

But before the robots replace us, we face the challenge of decreasing real wages resulting, among other factors, from automation and outsourcing, which will itself be automated before long. Inequality (you don’t need more statistics on this, do you?) is the biggest social challenge facing us. (Let’s call climate change, which has the potential to be apocalyptic rather than just awful, a scientific challenge.) And since wealthy people don’t spend nearly as high a percentage of their incomes as poor people do, much wealth is sitting around not doing its job.

Read the rest of this column here. Illustration by Kristen Hammerstad.